Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
DEPARTMENT FOR
TRANSPORT & DVLA
17 OCTOBER 2007
Q80 Mr Touhig: Do not give it back
to them, they will not do it again.
Mr Bennett: That is what I am
saying, that unless they do pay the release fees and surety fee
they do not get it back.
Q81 Mr Touhig: Would it not be a
good idea if you had the power to just scrap the vehicle? Every
one you have got that has not got a tax disc, turn it into scrap
metal.
Mr Bennett: The powers say we
have to give people the opportunity to claim the vehicle and tax
it.
Q82 Mr Touhig: Should we, as legislators,
be changing the law, get them prosecuted, get them fined, and
scrap the vehicle?
Mr Bennett: That would be a bit
draconian.
Dr Hickey: That would be a very
controversial policy change.
Q83 Mr Touhig: Yes, it would, would
it not? It would be effective though, you might have a better
figure then under evasion.
Dr Hickey: I could not possibly
comment!
Q84 Mr Touhig: Mr Bennett, we also
see that in the report the police say that three-quarters of persistently
untaxed vehicles are being used by people perhaps involved in
some sort of criminal activity. When will you have a strategy
ready to tackle this?
Mr Bennett: We do have a strategy.
That particular statistic that you quote came out of the fact
that we have done detailed work with the police and one of the
things the police have realised is that when a vehicle is untaxed
and caught on an ANPR camera—
Q85 Mr Touhig: What does the strategy
actually do? Have you got some sort of concordat with the police?
Mr Bennett: Yes. We work with
the police across the UK, and the local authorities, and we provide
data that enables them and ourselves to check for vehicles that
are not taxed. In the police's case, if the vehicle is not taxed
they will have our data and they will stop the vehicle and in
many cases when they stop the vehicle, and that is the statistic
you are quoting, they will find that vehicle has been involved
in crime or the driver is involved in other crime as well. That
is why the police do co-operate with us because it has a benefit
not only to the vehicle but to crime.
Q86 Mr Touhig: There is an agreed
strategy of working with the police to tackle this and that is
effective and you are monitoring it?
Mr Bennett: Absolutely.
Q87 Mr Touhig: The report also tells
us that last year you spent £5.4 million on advertising and
£4.1 million the year before. What impact assessment do you
make of this advertising because clearly you are not getting through,
are you?
Mr Bennett: We do measure advertising
impact actually. Obviously advertising is a difficult area, as
you will appreciate. We do try and target the advertising based
upon the need. For example, this year, to give you a good example,
going back to a subject we talked about earlier, we are doing
a lot more motorcycling advertising. We will change our advertising
to suit the feedback on evasion. This year we spent £3.9
million with £2.2 million on TV, £0.9 million on radio
and we have got production costs of £0.7 million.
Q88 Mr Touhig: Is this advertising
focused on the tax evaders?
Dr Hickey: It is by and large.
Q89 Mr Touhig: People reporting tax
evaders?
Mr Bennett: It is based both on
CR, so it advertises to people who might be casual evaders that
they must pay their tax or SORN their vehicle, and it is also
based upon pre-warning people that we will take and crush the
vehicle.
Q90 Mr Touhig: Say you have got a
series of ads that start running on television from tonight and
they run for six weeks, do you then do a measure of what impact
you have had after that six weeks?
Mr Bennett: We do. For example,
pre and post-campaign tracking that we held on the last campaign,
75% agreed it is not worth evading the VED as a result of seeing
it, 65% agreed the advertising deters from delaying payments and
63% thought the adverts were a good reminder. That is the kind
of feedback we get and we adjust our advertising accordingly.
Q91 Mr Touhig: We also see from the
report that 60% of those who did not pay their Late Licensing
Penalties you did not pursue. Are you considered a soft touch?
Mr Bennett: This is the table
on page 107, I think, of the Annual Report. There are 491,000
cases not pursued and, of those, 165,000 cases, and this is quite
important because the chart is difficult to understand—
Q92 Mr Touhig: I am very short of
time.
Mr Bennett: 165,000 of the 491,000
unpaid cases were considered and dropped, in other words they
were just not valid evaders. There might be a genuine reason why
that has happened. Of the 326,000 that are left we estimate that
43% do not pay but do comply. So you have got a situation here
where you are looking at payment or compliance and what we are
trying to do is get both, of course. 43% do not pay but do comply
and that 140,000 leaves a balance of 186,000 that are not pursued
and are not compliant. It breaks down. It is not quite the way
it appears in the report, it improves.
Q93 Mr Touhig: Why is it not possible
to tax your car in every post office?
Mr Bennett: We have a limited—
Q94 Mr Touhig: Why?
Mr Bennett: The reason is because
of quality of actual activity in the post office. We tend to have
enough post offices to meet the requirements of the public and
we have enough people who can have enough transactions to—
Q95 Mr Touhig: The more post offices
you have got the more people might register and you might spend
some of your advertising budget on that.
Mr Bennett: There are two issues.
One is how many people you have doing it and there is the expertise
in the post office, that is an issue, and then the sheer cost
of it. We have a negotiation with the Post Office to get the balance
right, so it is a value for money decision.
Q96 Mr Touhig: The public do not
think you have got the balance right, Mr Bennett. I hear lots
of complaints, "They can't tax my car at the post office,
it is a nuisance to have to go into a main town" and so on.
Mr Bennett: I am sure that is
true but there are two things I would say. First of all, the public
consistently rate the post office very highly in our surveys and,
secondly, they can use the computer now so people do not have
to go to the post office and that has eased the problem for people.
Mr Touhig: Just one final point I would
make. I have heard more "don't knows" from you gentlemen
today than I think I have heard in the Committee for a long time.
If you were not a monopoly I think you would go out of business.
Just one other final point: there is perhaps some link or comparison
with the TV licence evaders and perhaps when they do the TV licence
evasion they could also report back to you and you might go round
and see if there are any cars. It is worth trying perhaps.
Q97 Chairman: On Mr Touhig's point,
we are all being lobbied at the moment about our post offices
closing and it is a huge issue, particularly in rural areas. When
you own the Post Office, when you own the Vehicle Agency and everything,
why are you not doing more to encourage business through your
own post office outlets? It seems to me you are shooting yourselves
in the foot and in the process you are shooting down many village
post offices.
Dr Hickey: A lot of the smaller
village post offices, as we were saying earlier, do not do car
tax.
Mr Touhig: Because you do not let them.
Q98 Chairman: This would be a stream
of business which would help the Post Office and help the public.
Dr Hickey: The DVLA has been in
conversation with the Post Office about some aspects of work which
at the moment DVLA themselves do in local offices and the possibility
of some of that being done at post offices. There is a two-way
debate here. Of course, the big thing has been the introduction
of Electronic Vehicle Licensing which enables people to do it
either with a computer or a telephone, which is a very big improvement
in terms of customer service because we do it 24/7 and so on,
and that does have an effect on the Post Office, no question about
it.
Q99 Mr Dunne: I would just like to
get to the bottom of the numbers of the underclass. In the 2002
survey you calculated a 970,800 vehicle underclass but in the
2006 survey you have chosen not to publish the figure. Do you
have the figure and, if so, what is it?
Mr Bennett: The last figure we
had was for 2005. On the back of the main survey, the Jill Dando
Institute survey on the underclass, the last one we had was 2005.
I think I mentioned this earlier but perhaps I did not, I am not
sure. That was 930,000 at that point. In 2005 it was 930,000.
Because of the problem with this survey, the lateness of it because
of the problems we had with the reconciliation, we have not had
had the JDI survey completed for 2006 so we do not know the actual
underclass numbers yet. That is what has happened for this year
but we did for 2005.
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